Display MoreIt really depends on their contracts.
A K-pop album is sold for $15. You have store profit (30%), distributor fee (10%), songwriter royalties (10%). It leaves $7.5. Then you have to deduct printing costs (idk, $3?). It leaves a $4.5 (30%) profit to be split between artist and label.
When a song is streamed 30% goes to the DSP, 12.5% to the songwriters, 3% to the band and 3.25% to the singer. The remaining 48.25% is split between the artist and the record label, usually on a 40:60. That leaves the artist with a 20% profit.
A CF fee for a S-tier celebrity is 1B won, for an A-tier celebrity it's 800M won. Then you have to split it with your management company.
Tours you have to deduct the costs and then split it with your record label / management company. If you're booked to perform, you have to split your fee with your record label / management company.
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Groups also have to split the profit between all the members, while IU doesn't. She's also on her 5th label contract, so she must have very good splits. But there are group members making bank. G-Dragon spent $1M on a chair. Solar bought a $4M building.
This is a good break down. With IU's music profit alone, aside from the singer's cut. she gets a bit of share in the songwriter's cut too with her writing the lyrics to all her songs since 2015 plus composing sometimes too and she almost always is part of the composition team of her title songs which brings the big profit. She also produces her albums. Then the split profit between artist and record label is favorable to her too, rumor of her artist to record label cut is around 9:1 or 8:2 in favor of IU. Add in that some said she owns part of her company too, she also gets something in that record label cut.
It was only around Love Poem in 2019 that IU had good physical sales numbers.
if S-tier celeb gets at least 1B won per CF, which IU is, she has around 8-10 CFs per year, that is at least 8B won or $6.6M in CFs alone.
She does tour a lot. Maybe not as much as groups but she also extensively tours the whole of korea, not just seoul and a lot of countries in asia too.
You guys also forget the talent fees they get for just showing up at events and singing maybe 3-5 songs. I read before for IU gets that is around 20-30M won per corporate events/festivals. That is a profit of around $16k-20k for just 1-2 hours of work.
plus her acting gigs, no idea how much she earns there.
In short, IU gets a percentage from everything and is an outlier. But still, CFs, concerts and appearance fees gets the biggest profit for singers. Earnings from music is a plus, at least for IU that is.
